Aaron Read

Director of Information Technology & Engineering

Aaron Read

Ryan T. Conaty

Aaron leads the team that keeps our transmitters, computers and studios working at peak proficiency while strategizing future technical improvements. Born in Westerly and raised in nearby Mystic, CT, Aaron has lived in New England for over 30 years...albeit with a five year detour to the Finger Lakes of NY and Santa Barbara, CA.

Prior to joining RIPR in 2012, he's worked at, with, or for a multitude of NPR and college radio outlets; including WBUR (Boston University), WEOS & WHWS (Hobart & William Smith Colleges), KCSB (UC, Santa Barbara), KCBX, WMFO (Tufts University), WBRS (Brandeis University), WZBC (Boston College), WZLY (Wellesley College), and also the public radio programs The Infinite Mind and Living on Earth.

Ways to Connect

Sharp-eared listeners may have noticed some announcements this morning on RIPR, having to do with our FCC broadcast licenses. In fact, listeners to every radio station in Rhode Island, and all of New England, will be hearing similar announcements today. It’s because every eight years, AM & FM broadcast licenses expire and must be renewed; these announcements are required by the FCC as part of that process.

When you’re a broadcast engineer, you get used to receiving calls at odd hours proclaiming things that tend to fall outside the bounds of “normal.” It’s just the nature of the job. But even your intrepid engineer can be surprised sometimes. Friday morning, August 23rd, was one of those times.

That morning I got a call informing me that WCVY, our 91.5FM signal for much of Kent County, was off the air.

Air conditioning. Cool heaven for those who have it, blazing hell for those who don't. It didn't used to be terribly common in broadcast engineering, but it's become moreso in the last ten years. The reason is that, more and more, audio processors, RDS encoders, audio encoders/decoders, studio/transmitter links, remote control systems, and even the transmitters themselves, have all become increasingly "computer-like" with IC's, hard disk drives, power supplies, electrolytic capacitors and the like. All things that fail quickly when operated in temperatures above 80 or so, and the warmer it gets, the faster they fail!

We were happy to be a part of the Newport Jazz Festival this weekend. Our tent was right next to the stage, so Chief Engineer, Aaron Read set up a camera looking out over the crowd and captured this time-lapse video. Thanks to everyone who stopped by to say "Hi!"

Most people have heard of the "Three Mile Island" nuclear power plant accident of 1979. But it's famous among engineers for being a "normal accident", in that there wasn't any one thing that nearly caused a meltdown of catastrophic proportions...it was a series of little things inside a highly complex system that all happened as part of "normal" operations. None of which, by themselves, was terribly problematic. But they all happened at once, and that was a problem.

BOO! This time on the Engineer’s Corner, we’ll talk about PHANTOM POWER. Usually not as ghoulish as one might expect, phantom power has to do with microphones. Specifically, some microphones have active circuitry inside them. That means they need power to operate, but it’s unwieldy to run a separate power cord and audio microphone cable. So a phantom circuit is used to provide DC power on the same three wires (positive/hot, negative/cold, and ground) out to the microphone that the audio from the mic also uses.

A phantom circuit is one of those nifty things in electronics that looks, to the layman, like it can’t possibly work...but it does anyway.

Not quite what was spoken, nor quite a real alert, this weekend nonetheless saw KRTV-TV in Great Falls issue a LAE (Local Area Emergency) alert for several counties in Montana, and spread as far as WLW in Chicago. The LAE was, yes, a zombie alert, with an audio component that said: “the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living. Do not attempt to apprehend or approach these bodies as they are considered extremely dangerous.”

Actually, this winter we haven’t seen too much snow. Nevertheless, snow is something of a chore for us at RIPR, because it builds up on our SATELLITE DISH, which blocks the satellite signal. Specifically, our NPR and BBC signal, and that means when it snows = dead air on RIPR!

Here at RIPR, our offices and studios in 1 Union Station were designed in 1999, and designed to look like our original owner’s studios, WBUR. Their studios were designed and built in the salad days of the dot-com era: 1995. So to say that incandescent track lighting is a big part of our lighting scheme, is an understatement.

It has to do with our satellite downlink from NPR. We have a hefty 13-foot-diameter satellite dish, located in North Providence; there's no room for it at One Union Station! It points to "Galaxy 16," a telecommunications satellite in "geostationary" orbit that all NPR stations use.

"Geostationary," also popularly referred to as "geosynchronous," means that the satellite orbits the Earth in sync with the Earth's rotation...about 6800 MPH. That's pretty fast, but the key is that it's the SAME speed for both. So from our perspective here on Earth, the satellite just floats there, not moving, over 22,000 miles up in the sky! To put that in perspective, it's like driving from northeastern Maine to southwestern California, SEVEN TIMES.

In general, geostationary orbits work great for communications satellites like for NPR, but there's a catch: twice a year there's times when the Sun, the satellite, and our dish all line up perfectly. It's only for four or five days, and only for four or five minutes per day...but the Sun puts out so much energy on ALL frequencies that it completely swamps the satellite's own signal, so we lose all NPR, BBC and other satellite programming.

A common tech support request I get is for help with our stream/webcast from our listeners. The "digital illuminati" often like to claim that the web will mean the death of radio any day now, but streaming is still decidedly more complex and more tricky than radio's "push button, turn knob, get programming" simplicity.